Levi's Is
Radically Redefining Sustainability
And it all comes down
to making a timeless product that the customer will hold on to for many, many
years.
In focusing on sustainability, Levi's
wants to cultivate a "consumer who values durability and demonstrates a
real attachment to an object."
How do we make the fashion industry more sustainable? For Paul
Dillinger, head of global product innovation at Levi Strauss & Co, it's not
enough to simply plant a few trees to offset carbon dioxide or use less toxic
dyes. To make a real impact in the world, you need to help change the way
people think about clothes.
Levi's has always been a leader in sustainability. In 1991, it
established "terms of engagement" that laid out the brand's global
code of conduct throughout its supply chain. This meant setting standards for
worker's rights, a healthy work environment, and an ethical engagement with the
planet. "It wasn't an easy thing to do," Dillinger says. "At the
time, we were worried that doing this would drive up our own costs and
prices." In fact, what happened was that these practices were quickly
adopted by other companies, who used it as a template to write their own rules.
"We were actually leading industry toward new standards," he says.
These days, Levi's continues to focus on how it can push the
envelope when it comes to being green. Dillinger believes that part of the
solution is encouraging people to stop thinking about clothes as disposable. As
a designer, his goal is to create durable jeans that customers love and feel
good wearing because this increases the likelihood that they will care for them
better and keep them longer. In this Creative Conversation, we discuss what it
will take to create a real paradigm shift in people's thinking about fashion.
You're tasked with creating a product that is fairly
timeless and less subject to trends. Are you intentionally changing the
narrative about consumption?
Yes. In my wildest dreams, we'd be helping to cultivate a Levi's
consumer who values durability and demonstrates a real attachment to an object.
We'd be nurturing the person who doesn't purchase because of immediate seasonal
change, but who purchases for lasting value. This would mean there are shared
values between our brand and our consumer.
This seems to run counter to the fashion industry, which
values new looks and trends.
Yes, most companies are focused on
convincing the consumer that they are not pretty unless they radically change
their look; they're not going to be in, attractive, or cool. They
create a false appetite that directly leads to a pattern of hyper-consumption.
If someone is pushing boyfriend jeans on you real hard this season, they're
probably going to be pushing a super skinny jegging on you next season. This
radical oscillation in silhouette preference is going to make you feel that the
thing you just bought is no longer valuable.
Instead, what we're trying to do is encourage our consumer to be
conscious that when they purchase a pair of jeans, that is not an isolated
event. The garment had an impact before they purchased it, in terms of people
that made it and the waste that was involved in creating it. And its going to
exist long after they're done owning it.
What would happen if we could change culture in such a way that
consumers imagined the end of life of the product they bought? So, what if we said
that you could mulch your jeans, put them in your garden, and see how the
decomposition of your Levi's could feed the food that you were growing. That's
conceivably how we might dispose of garments in the future. That would prompt
the consumer to think about little details like how the color was applied to
the garment in the first place. Would the chemicals in the dye affect the
garment, my food, and my body? This is the kind of holistic thinking we want to
spur in our customers. Fundamentally, asking them to take into account the
impact they're responsible for in the whole system, from the supply chain to
the eventual disposal of the garment.
How do you cultivate that consumer?
It starts with the product. Take the 501: It is an anchor product
that has endured over time. Sure, it has evolved in some ways, but we don't
offer radical changes in silhouette. We're owning the history and the
provenance of our brand that makes essential, archetypal pieces of clothing.
"What would happen if we
could change culture in such a way that consumers imagined the end of life of
the product they bought?"
What we do is we try to maintain a fit portfolio where we ensure
that we have the fit you feel best in, not the one you've been told to feel
best in. Then we make that product available consistently. When you love a pair
of jeans, you develop an emotional connection not just with that object, but
with the brand. You know that the brand has served you well. If we can make
clothes that are really worth loving, then hopefully people will love them
longer and care for them better.
We're choosing not to participate in the fashion cycle. Instead,
we're choosing to cultivate long-term relationships with the consumer and
deliver against their needs. And hopefully that participates in the
recalibration of consumption broadly, though that is a lofty goal.
You're known for your forward thinking when it comes to
incorporating technology into fabrics. How do you do this, but also ensure that
you are making these classic garments?
Technology is a loaded word: It implies gadget. We're engaged in
scientific dialogue with a lot of different people, but not all of it lights up
the way you'd expect when you think of tech. There are ideas that we're
bringing to market that you might never notice. One that comes to mind is
coming out in the next six months. A lot of people expect performance from
clothing now. It's one of the reasons that yoga pants are winning the market.
The solution for performance has often been a mechanical or chemical application
to a garment, often in the form of a synthetic fiber blended in. Often these
technologies really flatten and dull the vibe of a jean. It starts to look like
franken-jean: a jean from an unhappy future.
"We're choosing not to
participate in the fashion cycle. Instead, we're choosing to cultivate
long-term relationships with the consumer and deliver against their
needs."
How do you bring that performance to a garment that is, in many
ways, very similar to its original archetype that is now almost 150 years old?
We've been working on this for two and a half years. The proposition is to
bring jeans to market that will be 100% cotton, but that have hollow yarn
architectures. We had a polyester that was woven into the yarn, but after
weaving the [yarn] together [to make the denim], we were able to dissolve it
out. What happens in that process is that we have the ability to wick away
moisture and hold in warm air, but the jeans look and feel the way an authentic
pair of Levi's should.
But I imagine that it is hard to create profound change
as one isolated company.
Yes, absolutely. If you look at how the food industry has evolved
and shifted, it's not one chef, or one farmer, or one supermarket choosing to
align itself around different values. It's a whole evolving system of
consciousness. Personally, I can only take responsibility for my own behavior
and advocate for these values.
But I also think there are other likeminded people that we can
seek out. We have a program called the Levi Strauss Collabatory where we bring
small designers who share our values and help them integrate sustainability
into their young new businesses. We give them the support they need to bring
that to life. So we can help nurture the ecosystem.
As a large company, what are you doing to make your
manufacturing process more sustainable?
I think it's important to focus on making products sustainable in
every place that we manufacture. It's very important not to use offshoring as a
way to hide the way that we are manufacturing. We believe in transparency. It's
incumbent on us to know that water is a precious resource everywhere in the
world. And it's important for everyone across the entire supply chain—from the
farmers to the factory workers to the people disposing of the products—to be
conscious of resource conservation. To do this, we have a life cycle assessment
that looks at the impact at every stage of the process, all around the world.
It's also about educating the customer, telling them that there
are better ways to care for their clothes. You don't have to wash your jeans
every time you wear them; in fact, this is bad for them. If you hang them to
dry, they'll last longer. A simple message like that allows us to involve the
consumer in a much bigger effort to carefully, deliberately draw down on
resource consumption.
And importantly, when we unlock proprietary data about water or
waste, the best thing we can do with that is share it with everybody. Last
year, we hosted a conference here at Levi Strauss where we brought in our
competitors and anyone in the industry who was interested, to share every bit
of knowledge we had about water-saving best practices. If you figure out how to
save water and you don't tell people about it, you're kind of a jerk.
ELIZABETH SEGRAN
https://www.fastcompany.com/3067895/moving-the-needle/levis-is-radically-redefining-sustainability
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